


'Cause I'm Standing Right Here: A Firefly Drabble Collection

by fledisthatmusic



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 17:38:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/764141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fledisthatmusic/pseuds/fledisthatmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five stand-alone drabbles from the 30 Day Drabble Challenge I completed with CaityCat a few months ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> This is the start of everything they know.

It began with just a passing glance.

Mal was in it to buy. He had a small bit of savings and a couple hundred credits left to him by his fallen men who had no family to take up the money. It wasn't much, but there were a couple of decent boats in this _go-se_ scrap yard. He needed a dependable one. Stylish, too, if he could get away with it.

Stylish was definitely not a word he would describe the ship greasy Mr. Yan was trying to sell him now. Zoe would have called it a phallic symbol, he was pretty sure, but Mal just thought it looked like a giant dick. And something about the color, the bend of the buffer panels, the way the fins jutted up like Tanner's broken ribs after a concussion mine, made him think 'Alliance.' And damned if that didn't put a sour taste in his mouth. Mal refused to spend the rest of his days puttering around space in a pecker-shaped government retiree. He had enough scars to remind him of the war, thanks much.

So Mal wasn't listening to Yan's wheeling. He turned away from the big ugly ship and glanced across the rest of the yard, wondering how long this was going to take. And then he saw her.

Mal had seen his fair share of beautiful women. He'd been in love, in lust, in convenience with a lot of powerful pretty creatures. But none of them, not a single one, had caught his eye like this. Her smooth lines, delicate curves, and proud frame nearly brought him to his knees. Sure, she was a little older, could use a good bath, but he felt himself smiling – a genuine, heartfelt smile – for the first time since before Hera.

The Firefly Class cargo ship was empty, filthy, smelled like old beer and livestock. But Mal stood on her rear bay ramp, hands in his jacket pockets, and surveyed her bare innards. Lots of space. Lots of possibilities. So what if she needed a little attention?

She was empty now, dead on the ground, but Mal knew that if he could fill her up – with life, work, people, freedom – that maybe, one day, she would repay the favor. Maybe she could fill the emptiness that Serenity Valley had left in him.

Serenity. Now there was a place to start.


	2. Companion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He struggles to understand what is really her, and what is the fantasy that she creates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during "Shindig."

“You'll lay a man out for implying I'm a whore, but you keep calling me one to my face.”

Mal winces internally at the hurt in Inara's voice, at the outrage on her face. He doesn't mean to hurt her, he rarely means the malicious things he all too often hears falling out of his mouth. But the heart of the matter is that Mal's always been an honest man (he makes a distinction between “honest men” and “honest work,” because there's no shame in needing to eat), and Companions thrive on implications and less-than-admirable means. Everything they do is a lie.

It's the manipulation that irks him, down to the core. Mal reasons that he wouldn't give a damn about her screwing people for money, if that's all there was to it. But there's always more, and that's the whole reason he's here now, stuck in this luxury prison cell of a bedroom with Inara in just her skirts, only now escaped from under Atherton's arm. It's not just sex, it's a fantasy that she creates, and that idea sticks in Mal's gut and twists something fierce. He wonders if anything she does or feels is real.

He wants her to be real. He wants what he feels (and hates himself for feeling) to be real. Right now, he can admit it to himself, because it probably won't matter in the morning when his innards are strung out across the lawn. Tomorrow afternoon, pretty-faced Atherton Wing will have a new personal Companion, and Mal won't have to suffer the injustice of watching Inara play a part anymore. Mal allows himself to think about it, about her, because even if he manages to not die, there will always be someone else waiting to take Inara away from what's real. That's just the life she lives. God only knows why she's stayed on Serenity this long.

Even if he were to somehow have Inara, he would never be happy. Mal knows himself enough to realize that he'd always be wondering if his time with her was anything more than a fantasy that she created for him. If it would be more than just a twist of her lips and his stomach and a flutter of her dark lashes and his heartbeat. That idea leaves a rotten, engine-oil taste on his tongue. Fake. Everything's fake.

Mal stands in the middle of the room, grip lax on the sword that's now digging into the fluffy white carpet, and feels the emotion gripping this throat like a finely manicured hand. He can try to play it off as fear, but really that's no better than lust, or love, or whatever the hell this is unsaid between them. So he doesn't try to play it off as anything, and he hears the words like so many others before he has consciously allowed his mouth to say them.

“Don't take his offer. 'Cause in the case that it happens, that means he's a fella who killed me, and I don't like fellas who kill me, not in general. I said before I don't have call to stop you, and that's true. Anyways, don't.”

He's always been an honest man.


	3. Denial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because he knows what he wants doesn't mean he can have it.

There are a lot of things Simon wants. He wants to still be a surgeon. He wants to have his feet on the ground. He wants to have a disposable income and the freedom to come and go as he pleases. He wants to be clean more often than not. Most of all, he wants his sister to be the silly, joyful girl he'd left behind so many months ago.

Of course, there are other things he wants. Things that would make Serenity a more hospitable place if he allows himself to have them. Things he can't have, no matter how much he thinks about them.

Simon keeps himself distant from the others for a lot of reasons. For one, they are a different class of people. He doesn't necessarily like to think himself an elitist, but he would be lying if he thought he'd be caught in their company if circumstances were different. Except perhaps Inara, but even then her line of work is at odds with the lifestyle of a well-known doctor. Shepherd Book is a good man that Simon enjoys sometimes conversing with, but he, like Mal, grows weary at the thought of God. Simon does not completely trust the Captain, no matter how many times he has saved them when it shouldn't have been his priority. He most definitely does not trust Jayne, wouldn't even if River hadn't opened him up on the kitchen table with a cleaver. Wash and Zoe are neutral enough, and he often finds he admires Zoe's steely nerves, if not her sarcasm.

But his personal views of his companions aren't the main reason for his aloof attitude. At any moment, he may have to take River and run. As much as Simon is uncomfortable with the crew and their habits, River seems to love the ship and the strange band of misfits aboard. Especially Kaylee.

Kaylee.

Simon catches himself watching her from the corner of his eye as she passes through a room. She's an enigma that Simon can't quantify, and it nags at him. He's never seen a girl – or anyone at all – take apart and reassemble a machine in the span of moments, all while carrying on an unrelated conversation. He has, during his occasional bouts of unrelenting loneliness while River was catatonic on sedatives, sat in the engine room with her while she works. She smiles fondly at him, blushing beneath the streaks of grease, and chats with no pretense or expectations except his company. Simon listens, but he's preoccupied with the movement of her hands, so gentle and certain and steady. He realizes at one point several weeks after becoming a permanent fixture on the ship that Kaylee is a surgeon in her own right – she can reach inside the heart of Serenity and fix all the aches, soothe all the pain. Simon is not the only person in this big black nothingness who sustains the lives of the crew.

He doesn't understand her, doesn't even pretend to know about half the things she talks about, but he likes her. He likes her and he stresses about it, because he can't have her even if he knew how to get her, and it wouldn't work out anyway. Out here in the black, he's nothing but River's big brother, an Alliance fugitive, a two-bit doctor in a run-down cargo ship working along vultures and thieves. He has nothing to offer her, not even his full attention.

He wants Kaylee. But there is one thing that takes precedence over what Simon wants: River's safety. Simon gave up everything he ever was and everything he ever hoped to be to get her out of that government facility, the one that picked her brain and destroyed her soul. He has given up all he wants, and that means he has to continue to do that. In order to have River, to get her back to healthy or as close as he can manage, Simon has to deny himself all that he wants. That includes hot showers, real food, paying patients.

And Kaylee.


	4. Summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The job comes first. Most of the time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fluff, because they don't get enough breaks.

There's a part of Mal that wishes he could just take a day off and enjoy something now and then, besides the weight of a full purse and the pride of cargo well stolen. It's a small part, but he becomes aware of it on days like this.

It's summer on this hemisphere of the little moon where they've landed. It's a surprisingly lush place; most of the outer planets are dust bowls and mine country, but Heathervale is rich with tall, sweeping grass and thick copses of trees. The terraforming must have taken a lot better here for some scientific reason that Mal has no interest in discovering. All he knows is that the greenery and the freshness of the air has gotten into his crew's system and is doing a finery of mucking up his plans.

“We're here for a _job_ ,” Mal reminds Kaylee as she bounds out of Serenity's bay hatch, her cute little geta clunking harshly against the metal.

“Yeah, but the drop's not for another two hours, Cap'n,” she answers with a smile that (Mal would never admit) makes his bones ache from its sweetness. “Can't we go for a swim? The stream over there's all sparkly and clean.” She waves her hands in the direction of the riverbank.

Mal starts to protest. “You don't know what kinda folk are stirrin' 'round these parts, Kaylee. Don't want anybody gettin' snatched again.” That day had been all kinds of hell.

Kaylee's eyes crinkle at the edges, and Mal somehow knows what she's playing at. “I promise, I'll keep a  _good eye_ on Simon. And River, too.” She's already unbuttoning her shirt, revealing a sturdy cotton tank beneath it.

“Girl, you're wasting a perfectly decent set of breasts on that doctor,” Mal says with a shake of his head. “He don't appreciate you like you want him to.”

“I appreciate 'em,” Jayne speaks up over Mal's shoulder, suddenly interested in the conversation.

Kaylee scowls, but it's still shining around the edges. Despite everyone's mutual agreement that Jayne tends to scratch at people, Mal doesn't think there's anybody on this boat the mercenary would jump to protect faster than little Kaylee. Jayne may not realize that, but Kaylee does.

She throws her overshirt at Jayne and strides out into the grass, calling out as she does, “Simon! Come on!”

Before Simon or River exit the ship, Wash is running almost full-out past the group, barefoot and whooping like he's never been on solid ground before. Mal is just about to comment when Zoe follows close behind, distinctly lacking her normal leather and cotton outfit for tiny shorts and a tank similar to Kaylee's.

Neither Mal nor Jayne have any idea what to say to that, so they just stare as the three swimmers start toward the riverbank at an excited clip.

Simon, River, and even Book finally make their way slowly after Zoe, Wash, and Kaylee, though River looks more right in the head than she has in days. Jayne glances at Mal as Simon calls out to Kaylee that they're coming.

“Maybe this ain't such a bad idea, Cap'n,” he concedes. “Get a few minutes to feel like people again.”

“You just wanna chance to see Zoe in those shorts again.”

Jayne's grin is oddly at ease as he saunters after the others. “She cain't kill me if she's unarmed and I get a head start.”

Mal hesitates until the sounds of splashing water and high-pitched laughter reach his ears. He hasn't seen his crew happy -  _really happy_ \- since before the Tams took up residence on Serenity. Maybe just a quick dip. He'll take his gun. That should take care of everything.

 


	5. Mad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yes, all of those.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible trigger warning: discussions of mental illness.

Mad. **  
**

Adjective. Mentally disturbed, deranged, insane. Enraged, provoked or irritated, angry. Foolish or unwise, irrational. From the Old English _gemǣd,_ to make angry.

Yes, all of those.

River perches on the railing of Serenity's upper deck in the cargo hold, curled in on herself and gripping her floral skirt as if it is the last parachute on a burning plane. The pattern is all wrong – the seams not put together evenly, so the little pink clusters of petals go five, seven, seven, five, seven, three down the stitching. It is distracting. She wants to rip the seams out, put it back together correctly. River looks away, the not-pattern still repeating in her mind despite her attention elsewhere. Five, seven, seven, five, seven, three. It doesn't make sense.

Nothing makes sense, but everything tries.

Words bounce through her brain like rubber balls dumped from a sack at a great height. None of them go together, and none of them are hers, but she understands everything, all of it. Fuel output, elliptical orbits, client schedules, torque, thrust, _yes oh god_ , bullet casings gun oil hulldensityglucoselevelsvaccinesforWhiteFall

_STOP PLEASE STOP THINKING_

River clutches the sides of her head, her dress still woven between her fingers so the thin fabric envelopes her face and there is a moment of glorious darkness. She takes a deep, deep breath, like Simon taught her, and repeats the words of a song she heard once at school when she was four.

She wants to cry, but that accomplishes nothing. Crying is a physical response to emotional upheaval like distress, sadness, or pain, and though River feels all of those, crying will only clog her sinuses and cause more discomfort. And it will make Simon worry. River can't have that. He already worries too much.

And River hates herself all the time because of that. She hates what happened to her – and those are the only memories she doesn't have. She remembers farmland on planets she's never visited, a drunken father she doesn't know, handsome men she's never met, battles in which she's never fought where boy-soldiers lay broken in heaps – but she doesn't remember anything after the men in suits strapped her down to a table and sunk needles into her skin.

She remembers nightmares, and blood, and Simon's voice coaxing her out of a drug-induced coma.

There's suddenly another voice, but River doesn't jump. She knew Inara was close, felt the brush of satin skirts when she was yards away.

“River, honey,” Inara says with a kind smile. “What are you doing up here?”

River drops her dress, ignores the pink not-pattern of five, seven, seven, five, seven, three, and looks at Inara. She wants to cry, wants to scream in anger and frustration and despair. Wants to beg Inara to hold her, slap her, put a bullet in her face and throw her out of the airlock into sweet black nothingness. River turns to look at Inara, opens her mouth to say, _I'm dying. I'm fine. Everything's all right. Murder you all, paint the deck with your blood. Jayne's a traitor. I love you. Mal loves you. Please god, help me._

But the words that come out: “The number of neuron cells in the human brain is more than the total number of stars in all known galaxies.” Her voice doesn't even waver, and her face is passive despite the rage storming just behind her eyes.

Inara looks a little startled at the seemingly random fact, but she smiles again anyway and plants a very light kiss to River's hair. “You look very pretty today, River.” Then she's gone, back into her shuttle.

And even if crying doesn't release any chemicals that improve brain function or mood, it seems to be the only way her body will respond to her direct commands. She pulls that stupid not-pattern back over her face and feels the tears drop onto the little pink clusters.

Yes, mad. All of those.

**Author's Note:**

> I challenged [CaityCat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/CaityCat) to a Drabble-Off a few months ago, and these chapters are my Firefly-related results.


End file.
